The encounter with the German armies, using quite well a richer and bigger range of guns and howitzers of various types quickly revealed the insufficiencies of the French artillery material. The early transformation of the movement war into a positions one made all the belligerent agree on that point, and all the fighting countries developped new artillery weapons all along the war years, making WW1 a gun's war. .

Millions of shells were shot during the war, and as a consequence, impressive quantities of different variaeties of projectiles can still observed nowadays on the former battlefields, naturally coming back to the surface or under the action of the farmers' plows. You will not often visit an acient 'red zone' without seeing some.

Such a battlefield walk some years ago made me meet a first fuze, a heavy German HZ14, and this encounter triggered my interest for these small mechanisms that are symbolically representing two sides of the human inventive genius, impressively creative but too often dedicated to killing eachother...

More than 856 millions shells have been gunned by the artilleries of all the armies, during the first world war. Between 1914 and 1918, one estimates that the German guns shot more than 300 millions shells on their ennemies... Each of these projectiles was equipped with a 'fuse', intended to make the charge explode at the right time.

Those were really precision pieces, as much in terms of mechanism than in terms of pyrotechnique. They can still be found on the former battlefields, either alone (when the shell have exploded), or still screwed on intact projectiles (DANGER !).

Main types of munitions

'The only way of hurting someone with a gun is to pass the wheel on his feet... !' Strange military sense of humour, but this is an evidence : the projectiles only are dangerous. Shrapnel, explosive, gaz, anti-tanks, ... the shell types of WW1 are various. Let us make a quick inventory.

Main types of fuses and their mechanism

You need a fuse to impulse at the right moment the explosion of the projectile that have been shot by a gun. Let us make a journey in this world of mighty precision. Discover the main functions and principles of those devices thanks to accurate 'home made' schemes.

Some fuses

Carefully observed the battlefields, or bought in militaria flee markets, let me show you a WW1 artillery fuses selection. Their identification is passionating. Discover for each of them several commented pictures, and a description based on the principles exposed in the previous pages.